Your Most Memorable EE Times Article

EE Times has been around for many years, starting as a newsprint publication. Over the years, we've published thousands of articles. Surely, you must have at least one that stands out in your mind. Now it's time to tell everyone about it. I'll go first.

Bernard M. Gordon

My introduction to EE Times came in the summer of 1979. I was about to start my senior year in college, and I spent the summer working in the engineering lab for Semiconductor Circuits, a power-supply company then in Haverhill, Mass. One morning, I found a copy of EE Times on someone's bench. I picked it up and read "The Inept Training of Engineers" by Bernard M. Gordon, founder of Analogic. Given that I expected to enter the engineering workforce the following year, I had to read the article.

Gordon, a legend in the Boston area and to his employees, suppliers, customers, and competitors, wrote that new engineers should start on the production line and work their way to the engineering lab. He stressed that to really design a product, you have to understand what it's like to assemble it. Working on the line would also give you the perspective of the factory worker. I remember the article clear as day.

The following year, I went to work for Analog Devices, Gordon's arch competitor at the time. There, I heard all kinds of "Bernie" stories. I don't remember any of them, and I wouldn't repeat them here if I did, but Bernie had been a boxer in his youth and had a pair of boxing gloves in his office. I did see them on my one visit to Analogic as an editor.

So, that's my most memorable EE Times article. What's yours? If you can find it on this site, please add the link to your comment. Otherwise, leave the headline or anything else you can recall.

In my first job out of college, I was at Analog Devices. The company meade ADC, DAC, and instrumentation amp modules made of discrete components at the time. I was in product engineering. My first task was to compate and ADI module with an Analog module. I had a schematics of the ADI module. After tracing the Analog module, I conslcuded that the two were identical. I asked the manager "Who copied who?"

He replied, "We copied Bernie."

Noboady at ADI ever referred to Analogic by its coporate name. We simply said "Bernie."

On the back page in later years there was a sometime feature that had book reviews of general books that engineers were reading. The first one that caught my eye was by Clive (as he was known then) Maxfield on "The Disappearing Spoon". A little later in his "Cool Beans" blog, Max asked for reader contirbutions and I thought "Why not?". My first on the book "The Flyers" is actually still on the web in magazine format. You can find all the contributions at the Engineer's Bookshelf URL. Unfortunately this has not turned out to be a very popular feature.

My 3 reviews were the last step before I was invited to blog for EE Times (as part of Microcontroller Central) and so has some personal significance.

EE Times was a weekly newspapaer, and so it ran more business than technical electronic stories althougn at the end of the print era it carried an excellent technical column on analog design which morphed into Planet Analog today.

There was a columnist writing from Japan (an American) and unfortunately I can't remember his name. One column I particularily remember was when he described how the Japanese were prepared to pay more for a product that supported their own industry as opposed to the North American approach to buy on price alone. That was some time ago, and I thought it rang true then , but given the long time funk of the Japanese economy perhaps it wasn't as insightful as I originally thought.

In late 80's I started reading a magazine, Electronic Design if my memory does not fail, and there was a section that called my attention "Pease Porridge". I really enjoyed reading those "What's all this --- stuff, anyhow?", it was fun and instructive.

I also remember several articles about the Pentium flaw. At that time one colleague created a modified C DSP/math library that was able to circumvent it.

I don't have a particular Geek Times article. I read (or at least scanned) Geek Times weekly to get the latest news and to read about the latest technology, because Geek Times generally had the information first. A week later, it was last week's news, so not particularly memorable or archival.

For memorable articles, my publication of choice was Electronics magazine, which I first started reading in the public library when I was a teen-ager. I found out that you could send in the "bingo card" and get all sorts of data books for free -- what a deal!

My most memorable Electronics article: "RISC: Is it a Good Idea, or just another Hype?", by Clifford Barney and Tom Manuel, 5 May 1986.

For me the EE Times article that first comes to mind is the one about the Pentium FPU flaw. If memory serves, EE Times may have even broken the story, which became a splash in the regular papers. For someone like me, interested in CPUs and how they are designed, that story and the articles that came later made for very interesting reading.